


Where the Bluebells Grow

by myrrhs



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Blood, Character Death, Gore, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mild Gore, Pills, Sadstuck, Sadstuckish, Self-Harm, Suicide, Zombiestuck, dirkroxy - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:02:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrrhs/pseuds/myrrhs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Many herbs are considered magickal, used in pagan rituals for a variety of purposes. One such is the bluebell, a flower of woodland that represents truth, luck and friendship. It can be found in rituals of death and dying to comfort those left behind and ease their sorrow. </p><p>It was almost a year ago when the first instances of the virus began to show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Zombiestuck two-part. The first is an intro. This is pretty gory, so don't read if you have a weak stomach.

It was almost a year ago when the first instances of the virus began to show. 

It began on the northern African plain years ago, staying subtle and low-key. Killed off some of the wildlife, but never the humans. Being viral, however, it eventually evolved and from there, quickly spread. First to the north, travelling with migratory birds to Europe. The first deaths were in a small village in Ghana. They weren't reported. There were no deaths for five more weeks.

And then, a young girl, a malaria patient, crashed and bled out at Regional Hospital in Tamale. She had been asleep and progressively getting worse, her skin beginning to gray and then whiten, though she was dark by nature. The girl woke, whispered something in scratchy French, and her eyes rolled back in her head as she shuddered and then collapsed, a growing red visible through her translucent garment and contained within the skin. She had exsanguinated between her skin and organs; the hot, sticky mass of red and black held in a grotesque likeness to a plastic bag. The girl did not move, but the blood did, pouring out of every orifice. She wept tears of blood that day, and others would weep the same at her funeral.

Health officials weren't too concerned. Probably not Marburg, they said. Surely not Marburg.

And then, after killing off almost everyone in her village, the virus disappeared for many years, only to return again in a different form.

The first symptoms were a mild fever, the body's response to foreign material. A stuffy nose, weakness in the muscles. The next was a pounding headache and pain in deep tissue. After that, sudden weight loss. Then, the skin began to turn gray, white, and rotten. It made its way to the central nervous system, where it wreaked havoc on the brain and eventually drove all conscious thought from its victims. The virus took over, programming the brain to do one thing and one thing only: Allow the host to spread the virus. The first symptoms were similar to that of a common cold, so it would be hard to diagnose until it was too late. The incubation period was almost two months before the symptoms began to show, and in around sixteen days everything was complete. The virus began to spread throughout Ghana, then throughout west Africa, by the hosts.

And so, the hosts did. The virus was spread through bodily fluids, so the most common form of infection was a bite. The creatures (they were't even human any more) were fast, they were strong. They weren't the slow moving, limb-dropping zombies of surreal horror movies. They were deadly. The creatures would tear chunks of flesh out of their victims, mauling them, disfiguring limbs and faces. More often than not, they killed their victims. Even a virus can't bring the dead back to life, and that was the virus' weakness.

It was now spreading throughout Europe, and then throughout the Americas, though no one quite knew it yet. And then, as winter approached and symptoms began to show, it was even more doubted.

Until the first zombies showed in Texas. 

From there, everything began at once, the alignment bearing down upon humanity and hitting full force. The beast was weak, but it was stronger than any team of scientists, try as they might to isolate it and pick it apart. The States dissolved into anarchy and disarray as families tried to stay together and kill off anyone nearby in the hopes of saving themselves.


	2. Chapter 2

Roxy Lalonde was a nurse, and an excellent one at that. She genuinely enjoyed helping people, and when the virus hit New York, she continued to help despite her own fear of what it might be. She treated the patients, she held their hands in the hospital beds. She changed the IVs and she smiled as she did it, always polite Nurse Roxy, though her heart was breaking slowly to see people hurting as they did. She never thought of what might happen until it was too late and the virus' true nature showed, grinning like a malevolent creature seen out of the corner of one's eye on a dark night, or perhaps seen carrying clubs and a bicycle horn.

She abandoned her post after the Texas incident, retreating indoors to stay with Dirk, who was living with her. Purely as friends, no more, no less. He'd moved from Texas to attend MIT, and Roxy had been nearby for her nursing graduate. After graduation, they moved in together, best friends as they were.

Roxy began to grow ill under Dirk's gaze. Not that he would admit it. Not that she would admit it. They both shrugged it off, because admitting it would be allowing the disease to win.

She got worse, the virus moving fast, its parasitic tendrils snaking across her body and driving, driving, slowly killing her. But it was just a cold, she said as she flipped through the channels on the TV, just a cold. 

Her skin grayed, but it didn't whiten. Instead it grew darker than she'd seen at the hospital, and as she eyed her white hair and gray skin in the cracked mirror in her bedroom, she knew something was very, very wrong. She barricaded herself from Dirk, yelled at him to leave her alone as she padded into the bathroom to fetch a medicine bottle.

There were thirteen pills, she counted. Thirteen was not enough. She tugged on the medicine cabinet in frustration, and then went through the rest of the bottles, dumping them out and swallowing them in fury, though it was only at herself. For getting sick. For putting Dirk in danger. For not fixing this.

And then she waited for her eyes to close.

\---

Dirk thought it was best to leave Roxy alone like she'd said. He'd check on her later, he told himself. She needs her rest. Needs her rest.  
He went to the garage and worked on another robot of his. Stress relief. He did not know how long he was there, only that it was very dark when he looked outside. He was tired, so he passed out on the couch. His last thought was to check on Roxy.

The next morning, he woke to the sound of something smashing. It had come from the upstairs, where Roxy's room was located. Dirk called up to her to see if she was alright, but received no reply. He headed up the stairs to check on her and noticed her door was open. Peering through it, he saw her hunched over, facing away from him, absorbed in whatever she was doing.

He said her name softly and she turned sharply to look at him. As she did so, he was filled with sudden dread, a terrified sense that something very bad was going to happen. And from there, he almost vomited over everything.

Her skin was mottled, gray and white and blue with lesions and bruises. A wild, animal look was in her eyes and her lips were blackened, but from dried blood rather than her signature lipstick. A red mark ran from her throat, and dried puke covered her. Roxy snarled at him then, rising, her shoulders hunched. She was poised to attack.

Dirk came to his senses. He turned and bolted from the spot, running down the stairs and to the garage as she dashed after him with a mad gleam in her eyes.

He grabbed a crowbar and opened the garage door, breaking into a sprint as adrenaline pumped through his veins, screaming at him to run, run, get away. She was just as fast, though, and kept up with him. Dirk knew he wouldn't make it-- Where would he even go? He turned and stood his ground, though he felt so very weak. His voice shook for the first time in his life as he spoke to the now stilled, wary creature that used to be his friend.

"R-roxy, I know you're in there.... It's just a nightmare, Roxy, you're not sick. Please, please, I'll.... Roxy, we can be together, we can do this, we can beat this. Please, please don't do this to me." By now he was crying. It was just a dream, he told himself. Just a dream. He would wake up and everything would be okay. The creature seemed frozen as he said this, but by the end was lurching towards him, mouth open menacingly. The adrenal that Dirk had, combined with fear, made him act rather than think and he tried to put his hands up, to hold it-- To hold her back, but his hand was moving too fast and oh shit that's a crowbar and it hit her, her neck, and she stumbled, and she's coming again and oh god maybe knocking her unconscious would work. He hit her again, this time on the head, but the blow was much too strong and she fell onto her back, red pooling from her forehead. It was bashed in, bone fragments and brain visible through the steadily growing bloody mass. Her eyes opened wide and her body shook erratically, spastic through the surge of brain activity, and he turned away from her.

Dirk looked back after a long time. Her gray skin was turning white now, her garments torn from the chase. Wispy white hair adorned her face, blowing steadily in the eerily quiet street. He looked at her face, and then looked away, and then back again. Though she was once a monster, she almost seemed to be... Smiling now. At peace. Her mouth was closed, but it was turned upwards slightly, and the craze had faded from her eyes, replaced with a serene yet fully aware expression. Roxy looked somewhere far away, somewhere peaceful amid the din of insanity and world-eating. 

Dirk brushed her eyes closed after hesitating. He put the crowbar down and bent down, kissed her lips, and lifting her from the ground gently, carried her bridal-style back to the house.

He buried her in the backyard. He did not feel grief then, only the reality of void. He picked flowers from the garden she had so insisted on growing, their indigo and blue petals glistening prettily with teardrop-like dew. He laid them on her grave and went inside, where he lay on the couch and flipped through the channels on the TV for a long while.

The next day, he went back to get his crowbar, which was lying in the middle of the street. As he picked it up, he noticed a red blotch on the end. Rust. He examined it more closely and his blood ran cold when he realized that it was, in fact, his best friend's blood. He dropped the crowbar as if it had scalded him and ran home and locked himself in his room. He didn't come out for a week, and when he did, his face was covered in dried tears and his arms and legs covered in cuts.

For the next month, he spent his time in the garage, drawing plans for new robots, only to discard them later on. He watered the flowers outside every day. 

And when he grew with fever, he was happy. As his skin turned gray and he felt himself dying, he became overjoyed. With the last shreds of sanity he had left, he took a bath and opened his veins, letting himself bleed out. He smiled as he died, for he'd be able to be with Roxy again. He could apologise to her.

\---

Less than two years later, after killing off most of the population, the virus suddenly disappeared yet again. Everything was shushed up by the World Government and the new generation of children born would never know of the carnage. The blood was washed from the walls, the old, abandoned houses left to rot. Every shred of evidence was burned, and the United States (now ruled by a dictator who called herself the Condesce) secretly praised the virus for giving humanity a new start.

\---

Sixteen years after the outbreak, a short boy with white hair and red eyes and a redhead obsessed with justice began to explore the old houses. They never found much, but one house they found was particularly odd to them. Doors were broken and a skeleton sat in the bathtub. In the garage, though there were many robots scattered about, there was only one plan on the drafting table. It looked to be a robot of a girl with light hair and full, dark lips. She looked happy.

In the backyard, weeds overgrew everything. But there was a patch on the side that the girl had spotted. It was covered in blue flowers, their bell-like petals glistening once again.

"Bluebells," she whispered, and the boy nodded and they stood there for a long while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Figured it'd be good for Halloween, but looking back on it now...


End file.
